Richard Whittall:

The Globalist's Top Ten Books in 2016: The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer

Middle East Eye: "

The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer is one of the weightiest, most revelatory, original and important books written about sport"

“The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer has helped me immensely with great information and perspective.”

Bob Bradley, former US and Egyptian national coach: "James Dorsey’s The Turbulent World of Middle Eastern Soccer (has) become a reference point for those seeking the latest information as well as looking at the broader picture."

Alon Raab in The International Journal of the History of Sport: “Dorsey’s blog is a goldmine of information.”

Play the Game: "Your expertise is clearly superior when it comes to Middle Eastern soccer."

Andrew Das, The New York Times soccer blog Goal: "No one is better at this kind of work than James Dorsey"

David Zirin, Sports Illustrated: "Essential Reading"

Change FIFA: "A fantastic new blog'

Richard Whitall of A More Splendid Life:

"James combines his intimate knowledge of the region with a great passion for soccer"

Christopher Ahl, Play the Game: "An excellent Middle East Football blog"

James Corbett, Inside World Football

Friday, July 29, 2016

Continued doubts about the longevity of the Saudi ruling family
are fuelled by its Faustian bargain with Wahhabism - a conser vative, intolerant,
discriminatory and anti-pluralistic interpretation of Islam.[1]

It is a bargain that has produced one of the largest
dedicated public diplomacy campaigns in history.

Estimates of Saudi Arabia’s
spending on support of ultra-conservative strands of Islam, including
Wahhabism, Salafism and Deobandism, across the globe range from $70 to $100
billion. Saudi largesse funded fund mosques, Islamic schools and cultural
institutions, and social services as well as the forging of close ties to
non-Wahhabi Muslim leaders and intelligence agencies in various Muslim nations.
In doing so, Saudi Arabia succeeded in turning s largely local Wahhabi and
like-minded ultra-conservative Muslim worldviews into an influential force in
Muslim nations and communities across the globe.[2]

The campaign is not simply a product of the marriage between
the Al Sauds and the Wahhabis. It is central to Saudi Arabia’s soft power
policy and the Al Sauds’ survival strategy. One reason, albeit not the only
one, that the longevity of the Al Sauds is a matter of debate, is the fact that
the propagation of Wahhabism is having a backlash in countries across the
globe, as well as on Saudi Arabia itself. More than ever before, Wahhabism, and
its theological parent, Salafism, are being put under the spotlight due to
their theological or ideological similarities with jihadism in general, and the
ideology of the Islamic State (IS) group in particular.

Speaking at a conference in Singapore, sociologist Farid
Alatas noted that madrassas -
often funded by Saudi Arabia or other Salafi and Wahhabi groups - fails to produce
graduates trained to think critically. “They have not been exposed to [Muslim]
intellectuals like Ibn Khaldoun,” Alatas said “That is the opportunity for
Salafis and Wahhabis” in the absence of Muslim scholars who would be capable of
debunking their myths he added. Alatas was referring to Abd al-Raḥman ibn Muḥammad
ibn Muḥammad ibn Abi Bakr Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan Ibn Khaldun, the 14th
century historian, who is widely seen as one of the fathers of modern
sociology, historiography, demography and economics.

Taking Wahhabism’s influence in Malaysia as an example,
Alatas pointed to the uncontested distribution of a sermon by the religious
department of the Malaysian state of Selangor, that asserted that women who
fail to wear a hijab invite rape and resemble a fish that attracts flies.[3]

Such attitudes fostered by Saudi funding, as well as Saudi
Arabia’s willingness to look the other way when its youth leave the kingdom to
join militant groups, undermine Saudi Arabia’s international image and its
efforts to create soft power. “It is often alleged that the Saudis export
terrorism. They don’t, but what they have done is encourage their own radicals
–a natural by-product of Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s conservative brand of Islam
– to commit their terrorist acts elsewhere. As the radicals leave, so does
Saudi money, which funds their violent activities,” said former U.S. Assistant
Secretary of State for East Asia, Christopher R. Hill.[4]
The estimated 2,500 Saudis who have joined IS constitute the group’s second
largest national contingent.[5]

The problem for the Al Sauds is not just that their image is
under attack and that their legitimacy is wholly dependent on their
identification with Wahhabism; it is also that the Al Sauds since the launch of
their Islamist campaign, have often been only nominally in control of it. As a
result, the Al Sauds have let a genie out of the bottle that now leads an
independent life and cannot be put back into the bottle. Wahhabi and
Salafi-influenced education systems played into the hands of Arab autocrats,
who for decades dreaded an education system that would teach critical thinking
and the asking of difficult questions.

Saudi funding of conservative Islamic learning neatly
aligned itself in Pakistan, which has an education system shaped by the
partition of British India into predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan.
This emphasis on religious nationalism, where minorities are perceived as being
inferior, involved a parochial definition of what it meant to be Muslim in
Pakistan.[6] The U.S. Commission on International
Religious Freedom (USCIRF) reported that Pakistani public school textbooks - circulated to at least 41
million children -
contained derogatory references to religious minorities. The perception of
minorities as threats was reinforced with the enhanced Islamisation of
textbooks in the decade from 1978 to 1988, in which General Zia ul Haq-ruled
Pakistan.[7]

“In public school classrooms, Hindu children are forced to
read lessons about ‘Hindus’ conspiracies toward Muslims’, and Christian
children are taught that ‘Christians learned tolerance and kind-heartedness
from Muslims.’ This represents a public shaming of religious minority children
that begins at a very young age, focusing on their religious and cultural
identity and their communities’ past history. A review of the curriculum
demonstrates that public school students are being taught that religious
minorities, especially Christians and Hindus, are nefarious, violent, and
tyrannical by nature. There is a tragic irony in these accusations, because
Christians and Hindus in Pakistan face daily persecution, are common victims of
crime, and are frequent targets of deadly communal violence, vigilantism, and
collective punishment,” USCIRF report concluded.[8]

“By imposing the harsh, literal interpretation of religion
exported and promoted by Saudi Arabia, we have turned Pakistan into a drab,
monochromatic landscape where colour, laughter, dancing and music are frowned
upon, if not entirely banned. And yet Islam in South Asia was once
characterised by a life-enhancing Sufi tradition that is now under threat. More
and more, we are following the example set by the Taliban,” added Pakistani
writer Irfan Husain.[9] A
Pew Research survey moreover concluded in late 2015 that 78 percent of
Pakistanis favoured strict implementation if Islamic law.[10]

Syed Imran Ali Shah whose father was murdered when he was a
child, was 16 when in 1999 he was admitted to Mercy Pak School in Peshawar, an
educational institution funded by Saudi-backed Mercy International Pakistan.
Zahid al-Sheikh, the brother of 9/11 mastermind Khalid al-Sheikh, was one of
the charity’s executives in the second half of the 1980s and the 1990s, a time
when Saudi Arabia joined the United States in financing the Pakistan-based
resistance against the Soviets in Afghanistan.[11]

Syed Imran says his radicalization was spurred by one of his teachers all of whom
were in his words Wahhabis. The teacher argued the importance of jihad in his
sermons.[12]
Jihad never figured in the school’s curriculum but students learned to believe
that the beliefs and practices of other sects were heresy. ”We teach students
the aqeedah (creed) of every sect and tell them as to how and where that
aqeedah is wrong so that we can guide them to the right aqeedah,” said Umer bin
Abdul Aziz of the Jaimatul Asar madrassa in Peshawar.[13]
Based on textual analysis of madrassa texts, scholar Niaz Muhammad warned that
“no one should claim that their statements about the madrassa curriculum have
nothing to do with sectarianism or other forms of religious militancy.”[14]

In a seminar moderated by Jordanian scholar Nadia Oweidat at
the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., on 3 May 2016, Ahmed Abdellahy,
a reformed, former Egyptian jihadist, described being educated in a school
system that divided the world into ‘us and them’. ‘Us’ were the Muslims who had
been victimised by ‘them’. Abdellahy said he was taught that: ‘they’, the
Christians, Westerners and “all the world is against us [Muslims] because we
are better than them.” Abdellahy said. He said this was an attitude engraved in
generations of children who were expected to accept it at face value. “When I
was going to school, the role of the school was to stop you from questioning,”
Oweidat added.[15]
The inability of Abdellahy’s school teachers to answer students’ probing
questions and a lack of available literature drove him to the Internet, where
militant Islamists provided answers.[16]

The current backlash of Saudi support for autocracy and
funding of the export of Wahhabism and Salafism, coupled with the need to
radically reform the kingdom’s economy, means that the Al Sauds and the
Wahhabis are nearing a crunch point, one that will not necessarily offer
solutions, but in fact could make things worse. It risks sparking ever more
militant splits, that will make themselves felt across the Muslim world and in
minority Muslim communities elsewhere, in multiple ways.

One already visible fallout of the Saudi campaign is greater
intolerance towards minorities and increased sectarianism in countries like
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia. In Pakistan, for example, a U.S.
Foreign Service officer, noted that in Saudi-funded “madrassas, children are
denied contact with the outside world and taught sectarian extremism, hatred
for non-Muslims, and anti-Western/anti-Pakistan government philosophy.”[17]

The recent shooting in the southern Philippines of Sheikh
Aaidh al-Qarni, a prominent Saudi Wahhabi cleric whose popularity is evident in
his following of 12 million on Twitter, further suggests that the backlash for
the kingdom is not just the Saudi government emerging as a target but also the
ulema[18]- including ulema who are
not totally subservient to the Saudi government. Sheikh Aaidh al-Qarni is a
product of the fusion between Wahhabism and the Muslim Brotherhood that
produced the Sahwa, a Saudi Salafist political reform movement. While
Philippine investigators are operating on the assumption that the Islamic State
(IS) group was responsible for the shooting, Saudi media were quick to report
that Saudi authorities had warned the Philippines days earlier that Iran’s
Revolutionary Guards were planning an attack.[19]

A key to understanding the Saudi funding campaign is the
fact that while it all may be financed out of one pot of money, it serves
different purposes for different parties. For the Wahhabi ulema, it is about
proselytization, about the spreading of Islam; for the Saudi government, it is
about gaining soft power. At times the interests of the government and the
ulema coincide, and at times they diverge. By the same token, the Saudi
campaign on some levels has been an unparalleled success, on others, success is
questionable and one could argue that it risks becoming a liability for the
government.

Problematic Soft Power

It may be hard to conceive of Wahhabism as soft power, but
the fact of the matter is that Salafism was a movement that had only sprouted miniscule
communities in the centuries preceding the rise of Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab,
and only started to make real inroads into Muslim communities beyond the
Arabian Peninsula 175 years after the death of the 18th century
preacher. By the 1980s, the Saudi campaign had established Wahhabi Salafism as
an integral part of the‎ global community of Muslims, and sparked greater
conservative religiosity in various Arab countries as well as the emergence of
Islamist movements and organisations.[20]
The soft power aspect of it, certainly in relation to the power struggle
between Saudi Arabia and Iran, has paid off, particularly in countries like
Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh,
Pakistan and the Maldives, where sectarian attitudes and attitudes
towards minorities, particularly Shiites, and Iran are hardening.

In Indonesia, for example, where recently retired deputy
head of Indonesian intelligence and former deputy head of Nahdlatul Ulema (NU),
one of the world’s largest Islamic movements that prides itself on its anti-Wahhabism,
professes in the same breath his dislike of the Wahhabis and warns that Shiites
are one of the foremost domestic threats to Indonesian national security.
Shiites constitute 1.2 percent of the Indonesian population, including the
estimated 2 million Sunni converts over the last 40 years. A fluent Arabic
speaker who spent years in Saudi Arabia as the representative of Indonesian
intelligence, this intelligence and religious official is not instinctively
anti-Shiite, but sees Shiites as an Iranian fifth wheel. In other words, the impact of Saudi funding
and Salafism is such that even NU is forced to adopt Wahhabi language and
concepts when it comes to perceptions of the threat posed by Iran and Shiites.[21]

Wahhabi influence has meant that “the nature of South Asian
Islam has significantly changed in the last three decades,” said international
relations scholar and columnist Akhilesh Pillalamarri.[22]

Pillalamarri argued that “the result has been an increase in Islamist violence
in Pakistan, Indian Kashmir, and Bangladesh. While governments in South Asia
have not initially made the connection between Saudi Arabian money and the
radicalization of Islam in their own countries, it is now clear that
Wahhabism’s spread is increasing conservatism in South Asia…. As a result, many
South Asians are now Wahhabis or members of related sects that practice a form
of austere Islam similar to the type found in Saudi Arabia. One of these sects
is a conservative movement known as the Deobandi movement, long one of the largest
recipients of Saudi funding,[23]
which, while indigenous to South Asia, is influenced by Wahhabism,”
Pillalamarri said.[24]
He was referring to the Deobandi school of Islam, the most influential sponsor
of Islamic education in Pakistan and Afghanistan’s Pashtun belt founded in the
19th century.[25]

Many of the madrassas were initially Pakistani state
sponsored, particularly during Zia’s rule. The funding was part of Zia’s
Saudi-backed aim to Islamise the country as a whole. “The global Islamic
reassertion spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and Arab petro-dollars was making
itself felt in Pakistan.

There were unmistakable signs of the Saudi impact on
Zia’s locally honed ideological agenda,” says South Asia scholar Ayesha Jalal.[26] Zia would handout as gifts and awards the
writings of Sayyid Abul-A’la Maududi, a Saudi-backed scholar whose
Jamaati-i-Islami party advocated the creation of an Islamic state. Maududi, who
was arrested in 1977, was released from prison by Zia’s predecessor, Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto, at Saudi Arabia’s request. Maududi used his regained freedom to
back the coup that would topple Bhutto and bring Zia to power. Maududi was
reported to have met with Zia for 90 minutes before Bhutto was executed.[27]

Zia’s funding of the madrassas dried up when he suddenly
died in 1988 in a mysterious plane crash. “We then had to turn to charitable
donors at home and abroad for funds to meet our expenditure. How else do you
expect us to finance our expenditure?” says Pir Saifullah Khalid, the founder
of the Jamia Manzoorul Islamia seminary, a sprawling semi-circular complex of
multi-storey classrooms and hostel blocks with a courtyard in the middle, in
Lahore Cantonment’s Saddar area.[28]

The mushrooming of militant Deobandi, Wahhabi and Salafi
mosques, often Saudi-funded, has led Pakistani authorities to link scores of
madrassas to political violence.[29]
Hundreds have been closed in the past years. The Crime Monitoring Cell of the
police inspector general in Sindh has reported that in 2015, 167 madrassas were
closed, of the province’s 6,503 with a collective student population of
290,000. It was also reported that there were another 3,087 unregistered
madrassas that cater to approximately 234,000 students.[30]

Deobandis, like Wahhabis and Salafis, advocate theological
conservatism and oppose liberal ideals and values, and like its theological
cousins, run the gamut from those who are apolitical and focus exclusively on
religion, to militant Islamists who empathise with jihadists and see seizure of
power as the way to implement the Sharia and change social behaviour. These
various ultra-conservative sects, irrespective of their attitude towards
politics and violence, benefit from the fact that with the government’s failing
to invest in quality public education, madrassas have turned into institutions
of rote learning for the poor. These madrassas evade conveying understanding of
the Quran, and are a far cry from the institutions of religious and scientific
learning in the first centuries of Islam that produced intellectuals, scholars
and scientists.

The luminaries of modern-day, ultra-conservative madrassas,
include the likes of Sami ul Haq, the scion of a Deobandi cleric, and former
senator who founded the Darul Uloom Haqqania madrassah in the town of Akora
Khattak in Pakistan. Ul Haq is widely
seen as the father of the Taliban. Ul Haq argued in a book published in 2015
that the Afghan Taliban provided good government, Osama bin Laden was an “ideal
man” and that Al Qaeda never existed.[31]
Ul Haq had vowed not to stop his students from interrupting their studies to
join the Taliban and awarded Mullah Omar, the late Taliban leader, an honorary
degree. The 2007 plot that led to the killing of prominent Pakistani politician
and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was believed to have been hatched in
meetings in Akora Khattak.[32]
A senior Pakistani interior ministry official said that, all in all, “most of
the terrorist attacks during the last three years could be traced back to
madrassas.”[33]
The militancy among Pakistani Deobandis persuaded more than 100,000 of the
movement’s scholars to issue a
fatwa (religious ruling) denouncing violence and terrorism as un-Islamic in
2008.[34]

Columnist Pillalamarri dates the expansion of Saudi and
Wahhabi influence in Pakistan to the US-

Saudi sponsored jihadist resistance
against Soviet occupation in the 1980s that created the basis for the funding
of thousands of madrassas, that at the time often offered education, shelter
and food to the most impoverished who otherwise may not have had an opportunity
to go to school. “Initially, the mushrooming of Wahhabi and Deobandi groups
worked to produce mujahedeen [freedom fighters] to fight in the war against the
Soviets in Afghanistan. Later, elements of the Pakistani government, notably
the Pakistani intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), saw
the spread of Wahhabism as useful in creating jihadist proxies to influence
Afghanistan and Indian Kashmir. As a result, despite the end of the
Soviet-Afghan war in 1989, the influence of Wahhabism continued to grow in
Pakistan,” Pillalamarri said.

Proselytization of Wahhabism was facilitated by an agreement
in the 1970s between the Pakistani and Saudi governments to promote the Arabic
language and Islamic literature in Pakistan.[35] The influx of sectarian, anti-Shiite Wahhabi
materials grew exponentially with the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
The International Crisis Group (ICG) concluded that “Saudi patronage has played
a particularly important role in promoting jihadi madrasas and jihadi culture
in Pakistan.”[36]

Saudi-sponsored non-governmental organisations like the
Muslim World League, which fell under the auspices of the kingdom’s grand mufti
but was populated by Muslim Brotherhood operatives and aimed to spread
Wahhabism beyond the kingdom’s borders, opened offices across the globe,
including South Asia. Wahhabi texts, including translations of the Quran, and
the writings of Maududi and Sayed Qutb, were distributed in Muslim communities
in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the United States and Europe. Wahhabi imams
(religious leaders) were dispatched to build madrassas with Saudi curricula
offering free education to the poor. Wahhabi beliefs were at the same time
exported when migrant workers returned home from the kingdom grateful for the
opportunity to earn money to support their families.

Once back from the kingdom, many of the workers prayed in
Saudi-funded mosques and adopted Wahhabi and/or Salafi practices. “People go to
the Middle East and come back thinking a certain way. There's Wahhabi money
flowing in,” states International Relations scholar Amena Mohsin, whose maid in
Bangladesh returned from a visit to her village fully covered. “It gives her an
increased status. In that area, near Chittagong, by and large everyone supports
the Hefazat-e-Islam, a conservative group opposed to Bangladesh’s secular
education and women’s rights policy,” she adds.[37]
Hefazat was founded in 2010 by attendees of Wahhabi mosques in Bangladesh.[38]

Evident Risks

The
risk embedded in the ultra- conservatism of Wahhabism and Salafism is further
evident in Bangladesh, a secular Muslim state, with militant Islamists waging a
brutal and murderous campaign against liberal and secular intellectuals,
bloggers, and publishers, and carries out attacks on Christians, Hindus and
Shiites. The attacks were largely the work of Islamic State and Al Qaeda
operatives, but were built on the nurturing of a radical, intolerant
environment by Saudi-funded institutions and Bangladeshi workers who had
returned from the kingdom with a far more conservative and black-and-white
worldview.

Saudi
influence was also discernible in Bangladesh’s gradual move away from
secularism, which was a pillar of the country’s first constitution after it
broke away from Pakistan and became independent in 1971. The kingdom only
recognised Bangladesh after the assassination of the country’s founder

Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman in 1975. President Ziaur Rahman two years later removed
secularism from the constitution, paving the way for the establishment of
formal diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia. Military leader General Hussain
Muhammad Ershad completed the process in 1988 by making Islam the state
religion.[39] The kingdom reportedly
funded Jamaat-e-Islami, a leading Islamist party, whose leaders were charged
with war crimes during the country’s war of independence. Several Jamaat leaders were sentenced to
death. Saudi Arabia lobbied unsuccessfully in 2013 to stay the execution of
Jamaat leader Abdul Quader Molla, but refrained from doing so in 2015 in the
case of Muhammad Kamaruzzaman and the party’s general secretary, Ali Ahsan
Mohammad Mujahid. Analysts said the kingdom was willing to sacrifice its
Bangladeshi political allies in a bid to ensure the country’s support in its
regional power struggle with Iran.[40]

The cooperation with ISI and other Pakistani government
agencies and officials turned Saudi Arabia from a funder into a player in
domestic Pakistani affairs. Adel al Jubeir who at the time was an official of
the Saudi embassy in Washington, told U.S. diplomats at a lunch in Riyadh
during a 2007 visit to the kingdom by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf: “We
in Saudi Arabia are not observers in Pakistan, we are participants."[41] US Charge D ’Affaires in Riyadh, Michael G.
Foeller, reporting in a cable to the State Department on the Musharraf visit, noted
that “the Saudis have an economic hold on Nawaz Sharif…. Sharif was reportedly
the first non-Saudi to receive a special economic development loan from the SAG
[Saudi Arabian Government], with which to develop a business”.[42] He was at the time in the kingdom in exile.
Sharif has since become Pakistan’s Prime Minister.

The degree to which Saudi paranoia about Shiites dictated
the kingdom’s efforts to influence

Pakistani politics through check book
diplomacy was evident in State Department reporting on Saudi-

Pakistani
relations in the waning years of the first decade of the 21st
century. One cable, detailing discussions in 2009 between U.S. Acting Assistant
Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman and United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister
Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, quoted the UAE official as saying,

“Saudi Arabia
suspects that [then Pakistani President Asif Ali] Zardari is Shia, thus
creating Saudi concern of a Shia triangle in the region between Iran, the
Maliki government in Iraq, and Pakistan under Zardari.” Feltman noted that, in response, there was a
pattern of Saudi Arabia withholding pledges in international frameworks for
financial support of Pakistan.[43]

A State Department cable a year earlier in 2008 quoted the
Pakistani Deputy Chief of Mission in Washington, D.C., Sarfraz Khanzada, saying
that Saudi-Pakistani relations were "under strain" because the Saudis
had no confidence in Zardari. Khanzada said Saudi financial assistance to
Pakistan had dropped sharply. The Saudis had not provided "a single
drop" of oil on promised concessionary terms. Instead, they had given
Pakistan a single $300 million check, considerably less than in previous years.
"Beggars can't be choosers," Khanzada had said, adding that the Saudis
were "waiting for the Zardari government to fall."[44]
Pakistan’s Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Umar Khan Alisherzai, told U.S.
diplomats in 2009 that “we have been punished by Saudi Arabia because our
president talks to the Iranians.”[45]

Then Saudi Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef went
a step further, advising U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke that the Saudis view “the
Pakistan Army as the strongest element for stability in the country.” Bin Nayef
described the Pakistani military as the Saudis’ “winning horse” and Pakistan’s “best
bet.” The Saudi official said that instability in Pakistan or tension between
Pakistan and India posed a threat to Saudi Arabia’s stability, because of the
800,000 Pakistani and one million Indians employed in the kingdom.[46]

Author and former Pakistani ambassador to the United States
Hussain Haqqani estimated that Saudi Arabia donated more than $2 billion to the
Islamist resistance against the Soviets.[47]
The investment, alongside that of the United States and others, fundamentally
changed Pakistani society and the country’s power structure. ISI, supported by
Saudi Arabia and the United States, exploited its role as the recruiter,
trainer and operations manager of the Afghan mujahedeen to expand and
legitimise ISI’s role as a key arbitrator of Pakistani politics by manipulating
the government’s allies and intimidating its opponents.[48]

Moreover, direct Saudi funding as well as support by the
Muslim World League of Jamaat-e-Islami -
the Pakistani wing of a movement founded in 1941 by theologian and philosopher
Abul Ala Maududi -
became a launching pad for Saudi-backed ultra-conservatism into then still
communist Central Asia.[49]

The movement’s Afghan wing was headed by figures who would
play key roles in the ultimate defeat of the Soviets and the rise of Wahhabi-influenced
conservatism and Islamism in the country. Burhannudin Rabbani, the theology
professor, twice became President of Afghanistan. Rabbani’s students included
Ahmad Shah Massoud, a legendary Tajik military commander in the fight against
the Soviets and Afghanistan’s subsequent civil war, who was killed by Al Qaeda
on the eve of 9/11; and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a two-time Prime Minister, whose
Hezb-e-Islami party received the lion’s share of Saudi funding for the
mujahedeen.[50]

Hekmatyar, the instigator of Afghanistan’s civil war in the
1990s, that in Kabul alone killed more than 50,000 people, was best known for
his targeting of those Muslims denounced as idolaters – just like the Wahhabis
at the beginning of the 20th century. Hekmatyar spent "more
time fighting other mujahedeen than killing Soviets,” quipped journalist and
author Peter Bergen.[51]
Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf, a Saudi-funded Wahhabi Islamic Law scholar, politician
and warlord, who split with Rabbani and Hekmatyar to form his own group of
mujahedeen, is believed to have facilitated Osama Bin Laden’s return to
Afghanistan in 1986[52]
after the Saudi was expelled from Sudan and assisted Masood’s assassins.[53]

Then Pakistani leader Zia-ul-Haq encouraged Saudi charities
to build mosques and madrassas for the large number of Afghans fleeing the war
to Pakistan as well as for Pakistanis themselves. With little prospect of
employment, refugee camps became recruitment centres for Saudi-funded
mujahedeen. Volunteers from across the globe were welcomed to train alongside
the mujahedeen’s refugee recruits funded by the Muslim World League.[54]

To help Pakistan alleviate the cost of hosting large numbers
of Afghan refugees, Saudi Arabia hired hundreds of thousands of Pakistani
migrant workers whose remittances boosted Pakistan’s economic growth. Many of
the workers eventually returned home imbued with Wahhabism’s conservative
values. The same was true for Pakistani troops enlisted to assist in fortifying
the kingdom’s security in a deal mediated by the United States. “Pakistani
workers in the Gulf and their families became either sympathetic or indifferent
to Islamization. The expatriate workers were also influenced by Islamist
missionaries backed by Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi establishment during the course
of their stay in the Gulf states,” Haqqani, the former Pakistani ambassador,
noted.[55]

[5]Ashley
Kirk, Iraq and Syria: How many foreign fighters are fighting for Isil? The
Telegraph, 24 March 2016, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/29/iraq-and-syria-how-many-foreign-fighters-are-fighting-for-isil/.

The history of Tashfeen Malik is a case in point. Her
experience and that of her family is indicative of the kind of tensions
adherence to Wahhabism's narrow mindset can foster. Malik moved with her parents to Saudi Arabia
when she was a toddler. The two decades in Saudi Arabia persuaded the family to
abandon their Sufi practices that included visiting shrines, honouring saints
and enjoying Sufi trance music - practices rejected by the
kingdom's Wahhabism‎. The change sparked tensions with relatives in Pakistan,
whom the Maliks accused in Wahhabi fashion of rejecting the oneness of God by
revering saints. Syed Nisar Hussain Shah, an academic at Bahauddin Zakariya
University in Malik’s native Pakistani town of Multan, whose madrassas are
known as jihadist nurseries, where she studied Pharmacology, recalls Malik
seeking assistance because her conservative norms clashed with more the
comparatively more liberal values of her dormitory mates. “She told me, ‘my
parents live in Saudi Arabia, and I am not getting along with my roommates and
cannot adjust with them, so can you help me?’” Shah recalls.[i]

While in Pakistan, Malik studied Islam for 18 months at the
Al-Huda Institute, a religious school with branches in Britain, the United
States, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Sri Lanka that propagates non-violent
Wahhabism.[ii] Students at Islamabad’s Islamic International
University, whose mosque was donated by Saudi Arabia and whose foreign liaisons
are primarily Saudi universities, are encouraged to attend religious classes at
Al Huda.[iii]
Cultural anthropologist Sadaf Ahmad describes Al Huda as a
“school-turned-social movement.”[iv]
Former students of Al Huda describe a curriculum that educates them in puritan
Islam, encourages them to isolate themselves from the outside world and view it
as hostile, and in some cases, brings vulnerable youth to the edge of
radicalism. Al Huda’s Toronto branch closed its doors in December 2015
following news reports that four of its students had attempted to join IS.[v]
After enrolling in Al Huda, Malik donned a hijab, refrained from communication
with the opposite sex, and spent most of her time studying the Quran.[vi]

“Women would often weep, overcome by religiosity. We were
constantly taught that this path was our choice, but also that not choosing it
was the way of sin. Gradually, perhaps because I was far from my family, young
and troubled, and my education in Britain had provided me with little secular
knowledge, I was completely sucked in… Only in retrospect do I realise that
essentially I’d been brainwashed into something resembling a cult… I feel that
al-Huda’s literalist, conservative interpretation of Islam, which discouraged
criticism or dissent, built a fire. It laid down the kindling, the twigs, the
wood, ready for a match. And the flames swept in from two directions. First,
from geopolitical events: the discourse of Muslim oppression that has gained
force across the world, which Islamic State, among others, uses so powerfully.
Yet it also requires an internal fire, something within an individual that will
ignite fundamentalist theology into violent action. Most women who leave
al-Huda institute are zealous for a while, but the sheer intensity requires so
much emotional energy that it invariably fizzles out… This happened to me… Yet
there was a time when I was lonely, isolated, a troubled girl with nothing but
my all-encompassing faith, when I know that a spark could have been ignited
within me. I walked on. Tashfeen Malik lit the fire,” said Aliyah Saleem.[vii]

“All her students, who you would think after coming closer
to God, would become more tolerant and at peace, have always showed the
opposite result. They became intolerant, judgmental and arrogant instead… There
is no real proof to back the theory that Al-Huda brainwashed Tashfeen and
others into terrorism, but one thing that is for sure is that Madame Hashmi’s
[Al-Huda co-founder Farhat Hashmi] institute promotes unhealthy fanaticism and
an orthodox manner of thinking. And that could very well turn one into a cold
blooded murderer given just the right push; all in hopes to getting in heaven,”
added former student Shamila Ghiyas, who had attended several classes given by
Al-Huda co-founder Farhat Hashmi.[viii]

Mosharraf Zaidi, an Islamabad-based columnist who
specialises in education issues, argues that if Malik was radicalised while
studying in Pakistan, “it was because she was exposed to ways of thinking that
these schools have helped to promote. They require people to isolate themselves
from modernity [outright] - television is wrong, eating McDonald’s is
wrong, mixing with the opposite gender is wrong. And once you establish that isolation, then
dehumanising people is easy…and if you leave someone there, you have left them
on a cliff.”[ix]

For people like Malik raised in a Wahhabi environment, as
well as those who were not, jihadism’s appeal is in part the absolutism that
ultra-conservative strands of Islam project. Both apolitical or non-violent
ultra-conservatism and jihadism see the acknowledgement of God’s oneness and
His sovereignty as the prime drivers of a believer’s life. All other aspects of
life, including family relationships, are secondary to that, which explains why
adherents of the Islamic State and other jihadist groups often break from their
families, as well as their past. Wahhabis dedicate their lives to prayer, study
of religious texts and mosque attendance; jihadis add the dimension of holy
war. Their dedication is rooted in Ibn Abd al Wahhab’s assertion that “worship
of Allah cannot be performed until taghut (polytheism) is denounced and
rejected.”[x]

Educational Vacuum

Al Huda and Malik’s example highlights the educational
vacuum in Pakistan, that militant strands of Islam, including Wahhabism, Salafism
and jihadism are able to exploit in a country with a poor educational
infrastructure and one of the world’s lowest education budgets.[xi] Pakistan’s some 26,000 madrassas graduate an
estimated 200,000 students a year. [12]

To be sure, the madrassas run the gamut in terms of theological orientation and
quality. They also run from mud-walled structures with rote memorisation of the
Quran at their core, to sophisticated institutions like Al Huda, to outright
jihadi conveyor belts. A Harvard Kennedy
School study put enrolment in madrassas at only 7.5 percent of all children
enrolled in Pakistani schools. It argued that enrolment had remained constant
much of the first decade of the 21st century.[13]
By contrast, the International Crisis Group estimated that 1.5 million students
were enrolled in Pakistani madrassas in 2002.[14]

Nonetheless, a 2008 cable from the U.S. consulate in Lahore
reported that “financial support estimated at nearly US $100 million annually was making its way to (conservative)
Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith clerics in the region from ‘missionary’ and ‘Islamic
charitable’ organisations in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates,
ostensibly with the direct support of those governments…”[15]
U.S. diplomat Bryan Hunt estimated in the cable that up to 200 madrassas in
southern Punjab, in towns like Multan as well in Dera Ghazi Khan - a juncture of all four of
Pakistan’s provinces -
and in the central city of Bahawalpur, served as recruitment grounds for
militant Islamist groups.

The consulate’s principle officer, Hunt, reported in his
cable to authorities in Washington that the funding had spawned a “network
(that) reportedly exploited worsening poverty in these areas…to recruit
children into the divisions' growing Deobandi and Ahl-el Hadith madrassa
network from which they were indoctrinated into jihadi philosophy, deployed to
regional training/indoctrination centres, and ultimately sent to terrorist
training camps in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).” He said
families with a large number of children who face financial difficulty as a
result of inflation, poor crop yields, and growing unemployment are targeted
for recruitment.[16]

Hunt said Gulf funding of charitable activities of charities
that fronted for groups like Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammed that had
been proscribed by the U.S. Treasury, had increased the local population’s
dependence on extremist groups and undermined the influence of moderate Sufi
religious leaders. Hunt said that the
charities targeted boys up to the age of 15. The funds, the diplomat said, had
officially been transferred to Pakistan to assist victims of a 2008 earthquake
in Kashmir and the North West Frontier Province. “Locals believe that a portion
of these funds was siphoned to Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith clerics in southern
and western Punjab in order to expand these sects' presence in a traditionally
hostile, but potentially fruitful, recruiting ground. The initial success of establishing madrassas
and mosques in these areas led to subsequent annual ‘donations’ to these same
clerics, originating in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Hunt said”[17]

The U.S. diplomat suggested that the influence of officials
in key positions in the Pakistan bureaucracy, who were sympathetic to Deobandi
and Ahl-e-Hadith, had thwarted efforts by Sufi and other religious scholars to
persuade the government to crackdown on extremist funding. “The brother of the
Federal Minister for Religious Affairs, and a noted Brailvi/Sufi scholar in his
own right, Allama Qasmi, blamed government intransigence on a culture that
rewarded political deals with religious extremists. He stressed that even if political will could
be found, the bureaucracy in Religious Affairs, Education, and Defence
Ministries remained dominated by (former president) Zia ul Haq appointees, who
favoured the Deobandi and Ahl-e-Hadith religious ideologies. This bureaucracy, Qasmi claimed, had
repeatedly blocked his brother's efforts to push policy in a different
direction,” Hunt reported.[18]

Describing in detail how Saudi funds were put to work, Hunt
reported that “the local Deobandi or Ahl-e-Hadith maulana (religious scholar)
will generally be introduced to the family through these (charitable)
organisations. He will work to convince
the parents that their poverty is a direct result of their family's deviation
from ‘the true path of Islam’ through ‘idolatrous’ worship at local Sufi
shrines and/or with local Sufi Peers.
The maulana suggests that the quickest way to return to ‘favour’ would
be to devote the lives of one or two of their sons to Islam. The maulana will offer to educate these
children at his madrassa and to find them employment in the service of
Islam. The concept of ‘martyrdom’ is
often discussed and the family is promised that if their sons are ‘martyred’
both the sons and the family will attain ‘salvation’ and the family will obtain
God's favour in this life, as well. An
immediate cash payment is finally made to the parents to compensate the family
for its ‘sacrifice’ to Islam. Local sources claim that the current average rate
is approximately Rs. 500,000 (approximately US$ 6,500) per son,” Hunt wrote.[19]

Hunt said the children were sent to one of up to 200
madrassas located in isolated areas where they are prevented to have contact
with the outside world and inculcated with “sectarian extremism, hatred for
non-Muslims, and anti-Western/anti-Pakistan government philosophy. Graduates
from the school are either employed as clerics and teacher or move on to
jihadist training camps.[20]

The infusion of Saudi money and Wahhabism into Deobandi
schools, some of which have produced many of the Taliban’s leaders, including
Mullah Mohammed Omar, the group’s supreme commander and spiritual guide who
reportedly died in 2013; and Jalaluddin Haqqani, a powerful commander, has changed
the very nature of the movement. ‘As Pakistan’s economy and politics have moved
towards West Asia, and away from an Indian history and past, its various Islams
have also been influenced by these trends. Pakistan’s version of Deobandi Islam
is affected by Saudi Wahhabism, and hence it becomes difficult to argue that
these madrassas are still in any sense Deobandi… Islam, even Pakistani and
Afghani Islam, is now globalised, Wahhabised, as well as affected by
geopolitical influences, which have a far-reaching impact on local and domestic
Islam,” said scholar of International Relations, S. Akbar Zaidi.[21]

U.S. Democratic senator Chris Murphy took the example of a
possible parent in a small town in northwest Pakistan, to depict her/his
vulnerability. “You’re illiterate, you’re poor, you’re getting poorer by the
day, unemployment in your village is sky high, inflation is making everything
unaffordable, your crop yields have been terrible. And one day, you get a visit
that changes your perspective. A cleric from a nearby conservative mosque
offers you a different path. He tells you that your poverty is not your fault,
but simply a punishment handed down to you because of your unintentional
deviation from the true path of Islam. And luckily, there’s a way to get right
with God, to devote your son’s life to Islam. And it gets even better, because
the cleric’s going to educate your son in his own school, we call them
madrassas, and not only will you not have to pay for the education, he’ll
actually pay you… And when your son finishes school he’ll get employment in the
service of Islam,” Murphy said.[22]

“And so for thousands of families in destitute places like
northwest Pakistan, it’s a pretty easy choice,” Murphy said. “But as you go on,
you lose contact with your son. Gradually, the school cuts off your access to
him. When you do see him, now and again, he’s changing. And then one day it’s
over. He’s not the little boy you once knew. He’s a teenager, announcing to you
that the only way to show true faith to Islam is to fight for it against the
kafir, the infidels who are trying to pollute the Muslim faith, and against the
Westerners who are trying to destroy it. He tells you that he’s going off to
Afghanistan, or Syria, or Iraq with some fellow students, and that you shouldn’t
worry about him because God is on his side,” Murphy added.[23]

The parents try to find out what happened at the school for
their son to become a jihadist. “You discover the textbooks that he read, that
taught a brand of Islam greatly influenced by something called Wahhabism… I
tell you this story because, as you know, some version of it plays out hundreds
of times every day in far-flung places, from Pakistan to Kosovo, from Nigeria
to Indonesia - the
teaching of an intolerant version of Islam to hundreds of millions of young
people. In 1956, there were 244 madrassas in Pakistan. Today there are 24,000.
So these schools are multiplying all over the globe. And don’t get me wrong,
these schools, by and large, they don’t teach violence. They aren’t the minor leagues
for extremist groups. But they do teach a version of Islam that leads very
nicely into an anti-Shia, anti-Western militancy,” Murphy said.[24]

The
pervasiveness in Pakistan of Saudi-backed ultra-conservative-inspired militant
Islamist ideology was on full display in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad
when authorities opted to shut down all cell phone coverage during Friday
prayers to prevent dissemination of a sermon by Maulana Abdul Aziz, rather than
detain the jihadist imam. Abdul Aziz, dubbed Mullah Burqa after he tried to
escape in 2007 from Islamabad’s Red Mosque at a time that it was besieged by
Pakistani military troops, has since been banned from giving sermons. Eight
years after the siege in which 75 people died, Abdul Aziz has re-emerged as a seemingly
untouchable figure, even if militant groups like Teheek-e-Taliban better known
as the Pakistani Taliban that he supports have been significantly weakened in a
military crackdown. Abdul Aziz illustrated the degree to which Saudi-backed
ultra-conservatism inspired ideology had gained currency in Pakistani society.[25]

So
did two events in early in 2016: mass demonstrations in February and March
protesting the execution of Mumtaz Qadri,
a jihadist who was an elite Force commando who was convicted to death
for killing former Punjab governor Salman Taseer because of his opposition to
Pakistan’s blasphemy laws,[26]
and for carrying out a suicide-bombing of a park in Lahore on Easter Sunday.[27]
As emergency units rushed to the park where 70 people had been killed and some
300, mostly women and children, wounded police in Islamabad sought to control a
10,000-strong demonstration against Qadri’s execution. Jammat-ul-Ahrar, an
offshoot of the Pakistani Taliban said the bombing was aimed at Christians even
if the vast majority of the victims were Muslims.

Taken
together, the two events suggested that Pakistan’s problem went beyond
political violence, to encompass a deep-seated, ultra- conservative and
intolerant interpretation of Islam that has taken root in significant segments
of society, and has created an environment in which oppression, discrimination
and violence against the other is legitimised. The Economist noted that, “the
religious hatred it (Jammat-ul-Ahrar) represents has been assiduously
cultivated in Pakistan for many years. Saudi money for the building of
madrassas (religious seminaries) began to flood into Pakistan during the 1980s
with the encouragement of the president at that time, General Zia ul Haq, a
Deobandi follower, who saw the country’s Islamisation as his main mission.
There are now some 24,000 madrassas in Pakistan, attended by at least 2 million
boys. Nearly all adhere to the highly conservative Deobandi sect, whose beliefs
are similar to Saudi Wahhabism.” Some analysts put the number of madrassas
closer to 30,000. They note that while a majority fall in the realm of the
Deobandi, a substantial number subscribe to other interpretations of the faith.[28]

The
magazine quoted Tahir Ashrafi, head of the Pakistan Ulema Council, as saying
that 60% of the pupils at madrassas were “not involved in any training or
terrorist activities.” In other words, 40 percent may be. “It’s a very complex
feeder system. All the remaining 40% are not involved in terrorism or terrorist
training, but they could be sympathisers, they could funnel part of their funds
to terror outfits, they could aid and abet in various ways,” said Mahmoud, a
Pakistani lawyer, businessman and author of a forthcoming book on Islam.[29]

In
the book, Mahmoud recalls that “a bright young woman who worked with my aunt
succeeded in penetrating a religious centre in the outskirts of Islamabad. The
centre served as an orphanage and school for girls. It taught them a way of
jihad. On occasion, young women, teenage girls, really, from the centre would be
introduced to teenage boys from other centres.
If a boy was to be sent on a suicide mission, he would be married to a
girl, and the couple would be allowed to consummate their marriage. The
experience was intended to provide the boy a foretaste of the pleasures that
awaited him in heaven, the girl an assurance of a place in heaven as the wife
of a martyr. If the boy did indeed
complete his mission, the girl would be free to remarry. If the boy did not
achieve martyrdom, the couple would be kept apart, in purgatory on this earth.
Both boy and girl were provided strong incentives to push towards the event of
suicide. The centre has been closed, but its cloistered, manipulative spirit
endures.”[30]

The
fallout of Deobandi philosophy – a “back to basics movement” in the words of
British Deobandi Mufti Mohammed Amin Pando –
goes far beyond the realm of South Asia, embedding itself deeply in
Muslim minority communities in Europe. A 2016 BBC investigative documentary
traced jihadist thinking to a month-long visit to Britain in 1993 by Masood
Azhar, a graduate of a Deobandi madrassa called Darul Uloom Islamia Binori Town
in Karachi, who headed the Pakistani militant group Harakat ul Mujahedeen.
Azhar, a portly bespectacled preacher, son of a Bahawalpur religious studies
teacher and author of a four-volume treatise on jihad as well as books with
titles like Forty Diseases of the Jews,[31]
gave 40 lectures during his fundraising and recruitment tour in Britain, and
was feted by Islamic scholars from Britain’s largest mosque network. More and
more scholars joined his entourage as he toured the country before moving on to
Saudi Arabia. His tour included Darul Uloom Bury (Bury House of Knowledge), a
boarding school and seminary that was home to Sheikh Yusuf Motala, Britain’s foremost
Islamic scholar.[32] A passionate and emotive
speaker, women reportedly took off their jewellery and handed it to Azhar after
listening to his speeches.[33]

Deobandis,
the Muslim sect with the greatest reach in the U.K., control an estimated 40
percent of all British mosques that service an estimated 600,000 people. A
substantial number of UK-trained Muslim scholars are graduates of Deobandi
institutions. Deobandis trace their roots to a seminary established in 1866, in
the Indian town of Deoband in the state of Uttar Pradesh, that was founded in
the struggle against British colonialism. The seminary is widely viewed as one
of the foremost institutions of Islamic learning, although it consists of a
host of departments that focus on the rejection of Christianity, Judaism, Shia
Islam, Barelvism and a postgraduate course that teaches loathing of Ahmadis[34] a sect is widely viewed by conservative
Muslims as heretic, because it recognizes Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as the messiah
prophesied by Mohammed. .[35] “The theology of the Deoband school…fosters
social change and nurtures the ideals of political activism,” noted Islam
scholar Ebrahim Moosa. Its adherents run the gamut from political quietists to
moderate-minded social activists to militant Islamists like the Taliban.[36]

With
Pakistan becoming a battleground in the proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran
in the wake of the 1979 Islamic revolution, Deobandis, funded by Saudi Arabia,
launched an anti-Shia campaign.

The fiery Deobandi cleric Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, a
madrassa graduate who became head of the Jamiat-i-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), a
Deobandi party, is reported to have maintained close ties to Pakistani
intelligence[37] until he was killed in
1990 by Shiite militants. Jhangvi, who earned his spores with his agitation
against the Ahmadis,[38] founded Anjuman Sipah-e-Sahaba (Soldiers of
the Prophet’s Companions) with the sole purpose of combating Shiites. With
Pakistani Shiites feeling empowered and emboldened by the Iranian revolution,
Saudi Arabia was more than willing to generously fund the anti-Shiite campaign.[39] As mentioned earlier, Saudi funds were
largely routed through the Pakistani military and the ISI.[40]
The Muslim World League also funded the prominent Indian Deobandi scholar,
Muḥammad Manz̤oor Naumani, who compiled a book of anti-Shiite fatwas that
included opinions of Pakistani scholars and was distributed in Pakistan.[41]

Marouf
Dualibi, an Islamic scholar with close ties to Saudi King Fahd was dispatched
by the kingdom to help General Zia introduce hudood, the Islamic legal concept
of punishment as well as mandatory zakat, a charitable tax, and ushr, an
agricultural levy that dates back to early Islam, as well as persuade the
Pakistani leader to adopt anti-Shia laws.[42] A
1981 report by the Council of Islamic Ideology - an advisory body of clerics
and scholars established to assist the Pakistani government in bringing laws in
line with the Quran and the example of the Prophet Mohammed – reported that
hudood laws were discussed by the Council and the Law Ministry “under the
guidance of Dr. Maruf Dualibi, who was specially detailed by the government of
Saudi Arabia for this purpose.”[43]

Pakistani
security consultant Muhammad Amir Rana reported that Saudi Arabia in the first
decade of the 21st century had donated US $2.7 million to the
education department of the municipality of Jhang in Punjab, Jhangvi’s
hometown, for the funding of madrassas.[44]
The Saudi campaign aimed at pressuring the Pakistani government to designate
the Shiites as non-Muslims and make Sunni Islam the basis for an Islamic state.
This also served to boost the fortunes of the Deobandis, who until then had
been a minor presence, at the expense of other Muslim groups, particularly the
Sufis.[45] “The Saudis injected conservative attitudes
into Muslim societies. They infiltrated Muslim societies. It created many
divisions and a sectarian culture. It has impacted Pakistan’s social fabric,”
Rana said in an interview.[46]

Sipah-e-Sahab’s
membership swelled to a million, including some 5,000 well-trained militants
who waged a campaign of terror against Shiites. The group was backed by a fatwa
issued by the Deobandi scholar Naumani, that declared Shiites to be non-believers
and was endorsed by hundreds of scholars in India and Pakistan. Maulana Wali
Hassan, the Deobandi grand mufti of Pakistan, banned Sunni Muslims from
marrying Shiites, participating in Shiite funeral rites, burying Shiites in
Muslim graveyards and eating meat from animals slaughtered by Shiites even in
accordance with Islamic law.[47]

Saudi
Arabia at the same time backed Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the internationally
designated terrorist who founded Lashkar-e-Taibe, one of the largest and most
of violent militant Islamist groups in South Asia, because of his longstanding
ties to the kingdom and his strong links
to the Ahl-e-Hadith[48] group that had maintained close bonds with
ultra-conservatives like the Wahhabis and Salafis since its founding in the 1920s.[49]
Saeed, a graduate of an Ahl-e-Hadith madrassa and the King Saud University in
Riyadh, backed by Saudi money, founded Islamic schools in which potential
jihadis not only studied Islam, but also acquired the computer and
communication skills they would need in their militant Islamist career.[50]

Much
of the British Deobandi community has in the wake of 9/11 sought to distance
itself from the minority of primarily Pakistani scholars and madrassas that opt
for an endorsement of violent jihad. Motala, , in an Urdu-language note to the
BBC said that “during the last several decades, I have neither uttered Masood
Azhar’s name in my speeches, even by mistake, nor mentioned his group, nor
talked about any nihilistic terrorist action.”[51]
The UK’s Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills
(Ofsted), however, concluded on the basis of an unannounced visit to DarulUloom
Bury in January 2016, that its students had a deep understanding of
"fundamental British values, such as democracy, rule of law, individual
liberty and mutual respect and tolerance for those of different faiths."[52]

[i]
Declan Walsh, “Tashfeen Malik Was a ‘Saudi Girl’ Who Stood Out at a Pakistani
University”, The New York Times, 6 December 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/07/world/asia/in-conservative-pakistani-city-a-saudi-girl-who-stood-out.html.

[vii]
Aliyah Saleem, “Al-Huda school is an institute of Islamist zeal”, The
Australian, 16 December 2015, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/alhuda-school-is-an-institute-of-islamist-zeal/news-story/3e71ba2b82c906211b7b3b6bc9adc64d?nk=4780091fb72330ac3e9ee1237f733a6f-1450590181.

[viii]Shamila
Ghyas, Al-Huda mightn't be linked to terrorism, but Farhat Hashmi's
misogynistic and Shiaphobic institute is a hub of radicalization, The Nation,
10 December 2015,
http://nation.com.pk/blogs/10-Dec-2015/al-huda-mightn-t-be-linked-to-terrorism-but-farhat-hashmi-s-misogynistic-and-shiaphobic-institute.

[ix]
Tim Craig, Pakistan is still trying to get a grip on its madrassa problem, The
Washington Post, 16 December 2016,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/pakistan-is-still-trying-to-get-a-grip-on-its-madrassa-problem/2015/12/16/e626a422-a248-11e5-9c4e-be37f66848bb_story.html.

[25]
Rod Nordland, Pakistani Military Deals a Blow to Jihadists but not to Ideology,
The New York Times, 17 December 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/world/asia/pakistan-abdul-aziz-radical-islam.html.

[27]
The Economist, Bomb in Lahore: The hard choice for Pakistan, 2 April 2016,
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21695903-country-threatened-not-just-terrorism-widespread-religious-extremism-hard.

[28]
Email exchanges with the author on 2 April 2016 of Pakistani scholars.

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About Me

James M DorseyWelcome to The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer by James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Soccer in the Middle East and North Africa is played as much on as off the pitch. Stadiums are a symbol of the battle for political freedom; economic opportunity; ethnic, religious and national identity; and gender rights. Alongside the mosque, the stadium was until the Arab revolt erupted in late 2010 the only alternative public space for venting pent-up anger and frustration. It was the training ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia where militant fans prepared for a day in which their organization and street battle experience would serve them in the showdown with autocratic rulers. Soccer has its own unique thrill – a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between militants and security forces and a struggle for a trophy grander than the FIFA World Cup: the future of a region. This blog explores the role of soccer at a time of transition from autocratic rule to a more open society. It also features James’s daily political comment on the region’s developments. Contact: incoherentblog@gmail.comView my complete profile